


Genesis 3

by meltokio



Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Drabble, Gen, Introspection, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-20
Updated: 2017-05-20
Packaged: 2018-11-02 18:40:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10950435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meltokio/pseuds/meltokio
Summary: And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.





	Genesis 3

You are born in an empty bathtub in an empty house. The first thing you ever smell is blood, coppery sweet. The first thing you ever see is blood, settling into the cracks in the porcelain like veins. Your first breath is also your first battle, hard-won as you cough up fluid from your tiny lungs. When you can breathe, you can scream and scream you do. So loudly that your mother sleeps with her revolver in her hand that night, just in case the noise attracted predators.

You don’t remember anything of your infancy, of course. This sets an important precedent. You will forget many things in your life. Nothing you will ever do can conjure up the memories again.

Your mother is a caravaneer, weathered and hard with razorgrain hair. She is always hot, her skin like clay baking in the sun. Every night you curl up beside her like a lizard on a rock, soaking up the precious heat. The temperatures plummet in the Wasteland when the sun goes down. There is no way to forget this fact.

You’ve never met your father and your mother assures you that you’re not missing much. No hard feelings. Just not the husband type. She sees her square jaw and clear eyes plain on your face, but that mahogany hair is his. You remember pulling at your braids when she mentions this in passing, and the way she pulled you tight afterward. For some reason that memory remains untouched. Even a bullet couldn’t dislodge it.

You hit puberty and start bleaching your hair, sloppily at first so that when the caravan guards catch a peek under your big ten-gallon hat they chuckle into their fists. Over the years you get more skilled with the mixture, more vigilant with rinsing, and soon the mousy-haired girl who shared her tresses with her father is a stranger.

When you hit your twenties your mother decides to retire. She takes her considerable savings and settles down in a town with strong walls and a plentiful garden. But the wanderlust is in your blood, and you take up with the Mojave Express to scratch that itch.

You are a decent courier, good with a rifle and usually expedient. You tramp as far as the Divide and travel to New Vegas. Or, you would have, had fate not decided otherwise.

You are ambushed by men in leather, bound and shot by a man in a checkered suit. You see light when the bullet enters your skull and nothing when it exits. Your last breath is cut short. Your last sight is a smoking muzzle. Your last smell is graveyard dirt.

You are reborn on a doctor’s gurney. You remember nothing. Nothing but braids and warm-clay skin. The doctor asks your name and you panic, clam up tight and let him check your vitals. Your age is equally indiscernible. It’ll come back to you, he says in his old-leather voice. It’ll all come back to you. Eventually.

You find your name on an old, yellowed movie poster. _CALAMITY JANE! Starring Doris Day_. The lady with the lasso looks sort of like you. Bright yellow hair in a wild cloud around an ecstatic face. That must be it. Your name is Calamity. Fitting, actually, since you trail destruction everywhere you go.

Your only purpose for a long, long time is revenge. It’s the lone rope pulling you out of the sea. Anger fills you to the brim, simmers your blood and sets in like disease. What you can’t kill you evade. What you can’t evade you charm. When your rage subsides, your vengeful hunger sated, another takes its place.

Yes Man sings a happy tune. An army: nigh-indestructible. An oasis: neon and vice and cold, hard caps. All for the low, low price of one shriveled old man’s life. Robert Edwin House had grown despotic and haughty. The man who boasted of eyes and ears everywhere never saw betrayal in his midst. New Vegas carves its independence from the NCR and the Legion in one fell swoop.

With a heavy-lidded eye and a battalion of _big_ fucking robots, you watch the rose of the Mojave flourish where it would have wilted.


End file.
